Shroud of Turin syncs

Last night I read not one but two references to (what I thought was) the Shroud of Turin in The Peyote Dance by Antonin Artaud -- not the sort of thing you expect in a French artist's tales of his travels in Mexico.

And an impression of the true face of Christ was shown them [the Tarahumara Indians], the same one that was imprinted on the veil of St. Veronica in the march toward Golgotha; and after mysteriously conferring, the priests of Tutuguri came and told me that this was indeed his face, and that it was in this form that the Son of God had once appeared to the ancestors of their fathers (p. 73).

[It] is He, the Word of God, whom the Tarahumara worship, as I was able to observe in the Rite of Tutuguri which takes place exactly at the rising of the Sun. And they themselves recognized this and told me so when two impressions of the Face of Christ were shown them. One on the Veil of Saint Veronica, the other on an Image taken at another moment of His Passion, and in which His True Face is perfectly recognizable (p. 97).

Looking it up now, for this post, I find that the Veil of Veronica is actually distinct from the Shroud of Turin, though they obviously have a lot in common. Each is a cloth on which the True Face of Jesus is supposed to have been imprinted by supernatural means.

Shortly after reading the above references in Artaud, I checked a few blogs and read Laeth's April 4 post "The Storyteller," a short story about a man who sells fake relics, making up fanciful stories about them in order to attract buyers. One of these apparently turns out to be the Shroud of Turin or some similar relic: "a piece of cloth, stained with blood and with a clear imprint of a face." The storyteller gets the idea of telling the story that "the cloth was the burial shroud of the son of the highest god" but hesitates, thinking it is "usually safer to go with lesser gods, smaller saints, more trivial personages." Later, not to spoil too much of the story, an angel informs him that "this time what you imagined is the real story, that is indeed the cloth which covered the body of our lord Jesus of Nazareth."

Today, for fairly random reasons (following a trail of links beginning with an article on a controversial psychotherapy technique I had heard mentioned in passing), I started reading the 1996 novel Nostradamus Ate My Hamster by Robert Rankin, an author I have never read or even really heard of before. In the opening pages, we are introduced to a pagan bartender whose regular customers have made it a tradition to give him "trinkets of a Christian nature" as Christmas presents every year as a sort of running joke. Going by the examples given, these trinkets mostly turn out to be fake relics of the sort featured in Laeth's story, including one with the image from the Shroud of Turin:

Last year he had received, amongst other things, a full-length bath towel, printed with the image of The Turin Shroud, which did little to enhance the post-tub rub down; several more nails from the true cross, that didn't match any of the others he already had in his drawer; an aftershave bottle containing the Virgin's tears and a genuine piece of Mother Kelly's Doorstep (this from a dyslexic).

(I don't get the joke about a dyslexic giving him a piece of Mother Kelly's Doorstep. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

After that, I checked William Wright's blog, which makes frequent reference to relatively obscure Tolkien characters, wondering if Túrin Turambar might happen to put in an appearance, but no dice.

Rationalized whim

On March 24, I posted "Turning suns into black holes," about syncs that had drawn my attention to The Peyote Dance, Helen Weaver's English translation of Antonin Artaud's Au pays des Tarahumaras (1947). That night, I dreamed of seeing a blog post with a particular title, and the next day (yesterday, March 25) I created a post with that title, "I am the wizard Lion." I proposed several possible interpretations of that phrase, but the one I ended up running with was that it was an anagram of rationalized whim.

Today, having been influenced by the syncs of two days ago, I picked up The Peyote Dance and started reading. When I got to the section called "The Mountain of Signs," which begins on p. 12, I was astonished to find that it dealt with the idea of rational whims. I quote the first few paragraphs (italics are the author's; bold is mine):

The land of the Tarahumara is full of signs, forms, and natural effigies which in no way seem the result of chance -- as if the gods themselves, whom one feels everywhere here, had chosen to express their powers by means of these strange signatures in which the figure of man is hunted down from all sides.

Of course, there are places on the earth where Nature, moved by a kind of intelligent whim, has sculptured human forms. But here the case is different, for it is over the whole geographic expanse of a race that Nature has chosen to speak.

And the strange thing is that those who travel through the region, as if seized by an unconscious paralysis, close their senses in order to remain ignorant of everything. When Nature, by a strange whim, suddenly shows the body of a man being tortured on a rock, one can think at first that this is merely a whim and that this whim signifies nothing. But when in the course of many days on horseback the same intelligent charm is repeated, and when Nature obstinately manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic forms recur; when the heads of familiar gods appear on the rocks, and when the theme of death emanates from them, a death for which man obstinately bears the expense -- when the dismembered form of man is answered by the forms of the gods who have always tortured him, become less obscure, more separate from a petrifying matter -- when a whole area of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its inhabitants; when one knows that the first men utilized a language of signs, and when one finds this language formidably expanded on the rocks, then one surely cannot continue to think that this is a whim, and that this whim signifies nothing.

He doesn't actually use the word rationalized, but whim is repeated again and again -- and again and again is expressed the idea that these whims are "intelligent," that they signify something, that they constitute a "language" and express a "philosophy." Clearly the idea of rationality is implied in all this.

For Artaud, it is the repetition of the same patterns that makes the whims begin to appear rational -- that rationalizes them. This is essentially the idea of synchronicity: that any sufficiently striking coincidence implies meaning.

And so this post's title turns out to be as self-referential as that of "I am the wizard Lion." Deciding to read that phrase as an anagram of rationalized whim was nothing if not whimsical, but now, reinforced by this coincidence, the whim seems to have been at least partially rationalized.

Turning suns into black holes

I have pinched my title (only changing the capitalization so as to conform to the FTND style guide) from William Wright's February 29 post "Turning Suns into Black Holes." The post included this photo William's son had taken, in which "Through the magic of the VTech Kidizoom camera, the sun was transformed into either a black hole or a solar eclipse":

This evening I was trying to declutter my desk a bit, sorting through some stacks of books, and I ended up picking up and flipping through an old paperback I had found at a junk shop in Taichung some months ago: a 1976 English edition of Antonin Artaud's The Peyote Dance, published by The Noonday Press at 19 Union Square West, New York. (In the Tarot, 19 is the number of the Sun.)

I discovered something I hadn't noticed when I bought the book: Glued to the inside of the back cover was a little handmade envelope made of folded blue paper, and inside it turned out to be a Fujifilm Instax photo on a rather familiar theme:

Nothing is written on the photo or envelope or in the book, so we will never know who took this photo, made a special envelope for it, and glued it to the back cover of The Peyote Dance, or why.

A further coincidence is that on March 20 I myself had stuck a photo inside this very book. The ophthalmologist (see "Eye drops on 113/3/20") had given me a photo of my own bloodshot eye to take home, and not knowing what else to do with it, I had stuck it between the pages of one of the many books on my desk, figuring it could serve as a bookmark if and when I got around to reading it. Unbeknownst to me, the book I chose just happened to be the one that already had a photo hidden inside.

The last pages of The Peyote Dance, just before the envelope with the "black hole sun" photo, are devoted to a poem by the author, composed in Ivry-sur-Seine on February 16, 1948, called "Tutuguri: The Rite of Black Night." The opening lines are as follows:

Dedicated to the eternal glory of the sun Tutuguri is a black rite.

The Rite of black night and of the eternal death of the sun.

No, the sun will never come back

Is it this poem, with its blackened-sun imagery, that inspired the book's previous owner to provide it with a little pocket for a photo of a blacked-out sun? There's no way to know, but it seems as good a guess as any.